Usability Inspection

A Usability Inspection is a quick and inexpensive way to evaluate a design. Our experts judge your site's compliance with recognised usability principles and design best practices. The result is a report containing expert analysis and actionable design recommendations.

What We Do

Preparation

We'll work with you to understand business objectives, common user tasks, and technical constraints. This keeps us focused on the functionality that is most valuable, and allows us to make recommendations that can be implemented.

Evaluation

We'll assign 2-3 experts to walk through your design and benchmark it against general and domain-specific design best practices.

Reporting & Debriefing

Once we've gathered a detailed list of issues, we prioritise them and develop design recommendations for each. These recommendations are divided into quick wins and long-term fixes in our final report. We'll also present our findings and solutions to your design team in person.

Implementation (Optional)

We'll help you to implement the short-term fixes we recommend. Plus we'll develop a proposal for a future redesign to address the deeper usability and customer experience issues.

How Long it Takes

Most full-scale inspections take about 2 weeks, depending upon the size and complexity of your design. But if you're pushed for time, we can turn things around faster by adjusting scope to fit your time constraints. For example, we can review a single page in a day, if that's all you need.

Frequently Asked Questions

When should I do it?

Before user testing. Don't waste users on the small stuff. An expert usability inspection will identify minor issues that can be resolved before testing, allowing users to focus on the big issues.

Before redesigning. Don't throw out the baby with the bathwater. An expert usability inspection will expose the elements of your existing design that work and should be retained (not just the bad stuff).

When you know there are problems, but you need evidence. Perhaps you've received complaints from customers or found yourself stumbling around your own site. An expert usability inspection can help you articulate problems and provide you with the ammunition to build a business case for redesign.

Before release. Let us help you smooth off the rough edges before go-live.

What can you inspect?

Anything from a single page or business process, through to an entire application. We can benchmark your design against the competition, or compare prototypes. In addition to websites, we can inspect desktop software, content management workflow and call centre processes.

Does this mean I don't need to user test?

No. Usability inspections are a great first step, but they only scratch the surface. A recent study found that usability inspections typically uncover around 20% of the total problems found during user tests.

What makes your Usability Inspections different?

Unlike many usability companies, we don't just point out problems. We provide concrete solutions. Our analysts have tested hundreds of websites and intranets, across every industry you can think of, with hundreds of users in the United States and across Europe. As a result we've developed over 500 usability guidelines that we can apply to your design. We know what does and doesn't work having researched a much broader set of designs than you would ever have time to evaluate yourself.

Why can't I just get it done in-house?

Internal politics often crush objectivity. As independent experts we deliver an unbiased verdict that focuses purely on what's best for your users.

Why don't I just user test instead?

You could, but users might get hung up on trivial problems that could have been resolved beforehand. Don't waste your money.